Litecoin is different in some ways from Bitcoin:
This upgrade provides users with the option of sending confidential Litecoin transactions, in which the amount being sent is only known between the sender and receiver. In May 2022, MWEB (Mimblewimble Extension Blocks) upgrade has officially been activated on the Litecoin network as a soft-fork. In February 2022, Litecoin has reached a marketcap of $8.7 Billion. This caused the price of Litecoin to increase by around 30%, before the press release was revealed as a hoax. In September 2021, a fake press release was published on GlobeNewswire announcing a partnership between Litecoin and Walmart. In 2020, PayPal added the ability for users to purchase a derivative of Litecoin along with Bitcoin, Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash which could not be withdrawn or spent as part of its Crypto feature. Later in May of the same year, the first Lightning Network transaction was completed through Litecoin, transferring 0.00000001 LTC from Zürich to San Francisco in under one second. In May 2017, Litecoin became the first of the top 5 (by market cap) cryptocurrencies to adopt Segregated Witness.
It was a source code fork of the Bitcoin Core client, differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time (2.5 minutes), increased maximum number of coins, different hashing algorithm ( scrypt, instead of SHA-256), and a slightly modified GUI.ĭuring the month of November 2013, the aggregate value of Litecoin experienced massive growth which included a 100% leap within 24 hours. The Litecoin network went live on October 13, 2011. Lee released Litecoin via an open-source client on GitHub on October 7, 2011. Litecoin inherits the scrypt mining algorithm from Fairbrix, but returns to the limited money supply of Bitcoin, with other changes. To address this, Charlie Lee, a Google employee who would later become engineering director at Coinbase, created an alternative version of Tenebrix called Fairbrix (FBX). However, the developers included a clause in the code that would allow them to claim 7.7 million TBX for themselves at no cost, which was criticized by users. Tenebrix itself was a successor project to an earlier cryptocurrency which replaced Bitcoin's issuance schedule with a constant block reward (thus creating an unlimited money supply). This would allow Tenebrix to have been "GPU-resistant", and utilize the available CPU resources from bitcoin miners. Tenebrix replaced the SHA-256 rounds in Bitcoin's mining algorithm with the scrypt function, which had been specifically designed in 2009 to be expensive to accelerate with FPGA or ASIC chips. Using code from Bitcoin, a new alternative currency was created called Tenebrix (TBX). This raised concern in some users that mining now had a high barrier to entry, and that CPU resources were becoming obsolete and worthless for mining. 0.1.0 / 7 October 2011 10 years ago ( )Ġ.18.1 / 11 June 2020 2 years ago ( )ġ2.5 LTC (approximately till August 2023), halved approximately every four yearsīy 2011, Bitcoin mining was largely performed by GPUs.